Abstract

In his writings, McKibben confronts us with a fundamental choice. The choice is not whether to drill ever deeper, deep-water oil wells or invest in further exploration for new oil fields because we will be running out of fossil fuel, as he argues. Nor is the choice whether to burn cleaner coal. The choice is not even whether to develop more efficient and less polluting technologies, more fuel-efficient and cleaner-burning automobiles, for instance, or whether to recycle or develop wind and solar power or tilt farm policies away from industrial agriculture. He encourages these latter, of course, but they are by themselves insufficient answers to the deeper challenges of our time. For example, efficient and cleaner...